Linden Bear Hunt

Many Lindens make a bear to give out to residents. Hunting Linden bear is a difficult
thing to do, since Lindens can hide invisibly and are often very busy with office
hours. Some will give them out when asked, and others give theirs for good deeds.

This Valentines day will give you a good shot at collecting more Linden bears.
There is usually an annual Kiss-a-Linden event on February 14. Don't want to kiss
a Linden? Too yucky? You say you just want to click and get one?

Well, you can! Get ready for the easiest bear you will ever get. There is a set
of SL8B (Second Life 8th Birthday) Linden bears
on the Marketplace.

There are many more bears that you can get by just knowing where to look. I have
seven more for you.

Make a Breedable Pet for Second Life

Multiple blinking eyes option

They live! I have a set of living robots in the dome in Phaze Demesnes, and in
OpenSim. These pets are based on the XS_Quail code (below), but are much improved
and are not specific to robots or quail or any other type of animal.

This is a small collection of pics of pets made by others; if you have a pic
of your xs_pet, please send it to me fred @ mitsi.com.

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Open Source breedable pet script for Second Life

I just published 8 pages of
an article on how to make your own breedable pet in Second Life. Xundra Snowpaw
has published the source code under the BSD open source license. If you want to
see what others have done with these scripts, check out
Twibbles at their store.

Please note that this is a good starter project for making Quail and learning
how to make a pet. But if you want to make something other than a Quail, please
use the Pet Robot scripts above. They are far more generic and can be used to make
almost any type of pet.

I cannot teach you how to make Twibbles. But I can show you how to use these
open source scripts to make a set of the original XS Quails. Once you have mastered
this step, you can change the scripts to make your own virtual pets. The zip file
includes the original code, modified code, and a re-written set of scripts for the
Pet Robot project (above) that can be used to make almost any animal.

According to http://breedables.wordpress.com,
the XS Quail and XS Cactus were first breedable ecosystem in Second Life. They were
based on the open source script available from the Seid Mushrooms creator. The Cactus
were developed and released first, in March, 2010.

On 25th July, 2010 Xundra handed out copyable Quail food and Cactus watering
cans, declaring the end of support for XS products. The scripts were published at
Google code on Jun 19, 2010 under
a BSD license.
This is the first article on how to
make your own breedable pet from these scripts.

Linda Kellie has graciously donated years and years of her work to the
open source community. Her site at
www.lindakellie.com has an amazing amount
of animations, hair, skins, textures, objects, sculpts, and even complete OpenSim
setups. I've searched for years for free sculpts, and I don't think I have found
more than one or two, so I was blown away by her sculpt collection. Linda has graciously
donated a huge amount of work! I've examined each and every sculpt, and I
can attest that she is very talented at sculpting.

Her site has all this neatly arranged into
zip files. But I never know exactly what a sculpt will look like until I pay to
upload it, so I wrote some Processing code to show you a 3-D view of each sculpt.

My conversion process made these into web-safe 3-D PNG and GIF images, and it
also makes Objects (OBJ) and Mesh (DAE) files of these sculpts, so you can use them
as a mesh or in any CAD 3D package.

I've kept a large hoard of seamless textures since the early 1990's tucked away
on various hard drives. Since Linda Kellie
has graciously donated a large number of textures to the open source community,
I'm combining my collection with hers and letting you pick and choose and see them
as seamless tilings.

How to make an animal and make it move using
Archipelis for Second
Life

I use Archipelis to make a lot of animals and birds in Second Life. In this article,
I'll show you how you can easily make a moving animal in Second Life by combining
the output of Archipelis from
http://www.archipelis.com/
with my newest database-driven Prim Animator. The clip at the right shows one possible
animation out of many. It is easy to draw and make 3-D content in Second Life with
Archipelis. When you combine this easy to use tool with my easy to use scripts,
you can make moving, jumping, and crawling objects in Second Life.

This is an easy project. I've gone into a lot of detail because
this is a powerful technique for making anything move in Second Life.

Free Sculpt Prototypes for 3-D packages

Here is a free set of
cubes, spheres, cylinders
and a flat plane that can be easily imported into a large variety of free 3-D
packages ready to make into any sculpted shape quickly and for free. These cost
me several thousand dollars and a month of work, so take advantage of me and download
the zip file of SL compatible sculpt prototypes. You can use these in almost any
software package. I've tested them in Daz Studio, Google Sketchup, Wingz 3D, K-3,
ShapeShop, Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended, Animator and AC3D.

Clothes Previewer and Free, Open Source Skins

Here
is a fantastic resource for anyone wanting to make their own clothes and skins.
I've combined open-source skins by Eloh
Eliot with the open source SL Clothes Previewer by Johan Durant, and I've also
updated the Clothes Previewer to use high-rez open-source templates. It works on
Windows and Macintosh, and runs on Linux under wine. I've also added free clothes
examples and posted instructions on how to use it.

A simple yet very useful sculpting tool

Thanks to Mikage Boa of slmame.com,
her is a very simple yet useful sculpting tool. I made an nice set of steps in just
a few seconds in this posting about it. Mikage
also has a nice online tool for making rod sections.

Show your land the best way - with automatic Phoenix viewer Parcel Windlight settings

The Phoenix viewer now supports automatic Parcel Windlight land settings that
send Windlight Sky and Water Presets to your visitors automatically. I've wished
for this for years and years.

Here is a quick video by
Jessica Lyon, the founder and manager of the Phoenix developer team, showing
some of the features:

For information on setup, and on various options, check the short article at
this link
or the Phoenix page.

Run Open Sim on a thumb drive.

OpenSim is starting to catch on. It's a great way to prototype and build since
it does not need an internet connection or any router or port configuration, so
it's ideal for use while flying or traveling or anywhere you don't have a decent
network connection, or any number of other circumstances.

How to make any prim in seconds with Prim Finder

Ever needed a particular shape of a prim? Daunted by the large number of options
in the editor box? Well, it's far easier to make prims with this wonderful tool
by Crystal Gadgets.

This tools costs L$390 and is worth every penny . If you are serious about building,
then it is a must-have item!

How to Get Free Giant-Mega Prims

Ever needed a particular giant or mega prim? You can find many mega prim packages
inworld or at SL webstores. But digging through your inventory or running around
and actually paying for a mega prim is a not a very good idea.

Make Sculpties look great!

Wonder why those sculpties look distorted and blobby? Here is a simple fix!

Bring up the 'Advanced' menu with Ctrl-Alt-D, or Opt-Ctrl-D on a Mac. A new tool
bar item "Advanced" will appear at the top.

Select the menu for 'debug settings' near the bottom.

In the blank space, copy and paste the word: RenderVolumeLODFactor,
and set the value to 4 to get all sculpts looking great.

Single script Super Prim animator

This one-script prim animator
is is one of the most useful scripts in Second Life™. You can now animate any object,
with just one script!

Setup is very simple. Just drop the script and a blank notecard into the object,
click the object, and give your animation a name. Move all the prims around, and
click Record. When done, click the Animation Name, and watch it play back every
move!This script uses a new and very fast command called 'llSetPrimitiveParamsFast'.
This means that dozens of prims can move almost instantly.

's
LSL Script Database has a bunch of open source, copyleft, and public domain
LSL Scripts. It is a user-created wiki that anyone can contribute to. It features
LSL Script syntax highlighting with links to the wiki. I've just added live, real-time
syntax checking with LSLEditor by Alphons van der Heijden, who
graciously donated his masterpiece to the Open Source community. LSL-Editor
is a standalone LSL (Second life) script editor and run-time environment
for Windows. It compiles and executes LSL scripts. No Second Life viewer is needed
nor do you need a connection to the Second Life grid.

LSL Editor

LSLEditor has just had it's first major update in several years, thanks to
Manfred Aabye.

Open source 3-D sim scanner

I'll show you how to use two free tools (and you
get a third for free) that you can use to create your very own
Sim Scanner, with realistic topography
and moving people indicators. We'll be combining a free sim scanner with your sims
3-D topography with moving, mouse-stirrable flash water. Sounds complicated? It's
not. You can grab a copy of mine (shown at left), and with one quick trip in Second
Life and a simple crop in a paint program, have your very own land in a classy 3-D
scanner. >

Introducing a free tool to make sculpted water that moves
in Second Life

I discovered a great new tool by Zeja Pyle that is so simple to use I just
had to make something with it.
SLPrimEmboss is intended
to make embossed signs... which is.... well, boring, so I made something useful
from it. I've posted this article on
How to make water move in 3-D Second
Life. This looks great in ponds and in waterfalls since it moves up and down
as well as side-to-side just like real water does.

Here's a video of it running with my finger-stirrable Viewer 2 flash water included,
and without.Bonus: Animated GIF editor included!

How to Make Sculpted Furniture

My dear friend Wavinggirl had a small stool when she was a young girl. She found
a picture of it and asked if it was possible to make a model of it in Second Life.
This post shows you how to make the sculpted
legs using a very simple to use ( and free! ) tool. As a bonus, I will show you
how to make sculpts very smooth, like they have been sandpapered smooth, using another
great free tool.

I had to make this for our Sim

Here is something that took me a long time to make, by hand...A look back at our
sim,
Phaze Demesnes, somewhere in time. After months of head scratching,
I finally killed all the fleas and came up with a general solution.

You can now enter any sim name and get the overhead map view, everywhere in time.
The raw data for your sim comes on-the-fly from Tyche Shepard @
gridsurvey.com, the best stats site on Second life, anywhere. There's more than
3 million rows in this database now!

Enter any sim name here for the Objects history:

You can also get the Topography image from this search:

Enter any sim name here:

Continuous Play multiple Mp3's With Second Life Viewer 2

Hate the 10-second play time limit on sound in Second Life? Don't you just hate
the awful lag as 44 kHz uncompressed wav files download to a sim-load of avatars
from an already overloaded Linden server? Hate the inability to queue sounds seamlessly?
Did your wedding march gets broken up? Here is a darn good reason to switch to Viewer
2. The new media on a prim solves these sound and video problems, forever. Now you
can easily play any compressed MP3 file with endless loop control, with music of
any length, and even do an entire play list, with no pauses! Drop
this script into a prim, and it will play two clips I have pre-loaded. Plop
it into a tree, shrub, furniture, anything! Add cool ambiance music to pose balls,
or use it to DJ a club. You can add multiple MP3 URL's into the list, and because
it is open source, you can modify it easily to listen on chat channels for URL's,
read a list of MP3s from note cards, or use text to speech so your products can
greet your visitors, by name!

How to make water you can ripple in Second Life™

Just drop
this script into any prim, and click it! Place your prim just under the Second
Life water and it will look marvelous!

It works the same in Second Life as it does here.

Just wave your mouse over it.

The Blue Whale Project

Want to make animals move realistically? Don't you just hate it when your $$
expensive prim animator adds 0.2 second delays and the moving parts on your 'whatever'
look jerky? Need a good, free, open source prim animator?

Create Animations with QAVIMATOR

Get
QAvimator, an easy to use and free Second Life™ compatible animation editor.

Here is a Blue Adept and Red Adept example
pose set
made in
QAvimator that WavinggirlsAV Voom and I used to make a replication of Piers
Anthony's book cover art for the "Blue Adept", book two of the "The Apprentice Adept"
series of fantasy novels. (FYI: Phaze Demesnes, our sim, is modeled after this series)

The best method to make these in Second Life™ is to fly up to 100-200 meters, and
go into mouse look mode. Aim your camera at the horizon. Press Ctrl-` to take a
picture. Move your camera in a circle, with plenty of overlap, and take pictures
all the way around, overlapping each picture with recognizable features in each
frame. Continue all the way around in a spiral, overlapping the tops and bottom
edges as you go. I used about 60 images for the spaceport. You then upload these
into
Hugin,
and use the tools in it to stitch them into a image.

Create scripted objects in
Second Life™ the easy way

What is Scratch for Second Life™ (S4SL)?

S4SL is a new easy way to add behaviors and interactivity to your objects in Second
Life™. S4SL is graphical programming language that lets you construct programs by
snapping together graphical blocks. With S4SL, you can snap together a few blocks
to make your SL pet interact with you using chat commands, make your sculpture change
size and color, or make your house respond to your presence.